M. Amin Farajian

Also published as: Mohammad Amin Farajian


2022

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Findings of the WMT 2022 Shared Task on Chat Translation
Ana C Farinha | M. Amin Farajian | Marianna Buchicchio | Patrick Fernandes | José G. C. de Souza | Helena Moniz | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper reports the findings of the second edition of the Chat Translation Shared Task. Similarly to the previous WMT 2020 edition, the task consisted of translating bilingual customer support conversational text. However, unlike the previous edition, in which the bilingual data was created from a synthetic monolingual English corpus, this year we used a portion of the newly released Unbabel’s MAIA corpus, which contains genuine bilingual conversations between agents and customers. We also expanded the language pairs to English↔German (en↔de), English↔French (en↔fr), and English↔Brazilian Portuguese (en↔pt-br).Given that the main goal of the shared task is to translate bilingual conversations, participants were encouraged to train and test their models specifically for this environment. In total, we received 18 submissions from 4 different teams. All teams participated in both directions of en↔de. One of the teams also participated in en↔fr and en↔pt-br. We evaluated the submissions with automatic metrics as well as human judgments via Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) on both directions. The official ranking of the systems is based on the overall MQM scores of the participating systems on both directions, i.e. agent and customer.

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Unbabel-IST at the WMT Chat Translation Shared Task
João Alves | Pedro Henrique Martins | José G. C. de Souza | M. Amin Farajian | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

We present the joint contribution of IST and Unbabel to the WMT 2022 Chat Translation Shared Task. We participated in all six language directions (English ↔ German, English ↔ French, English ↔ Brazilian Portuguese). Due to the lack of domain-specific data, we use mBART50, a large pretrained language model trained on millions of sentence-pairs, as our base model. We fine-tune it using a two step fine-tuning process. In the first step, we fine-tune the model on publicly available data. In the second step, we use the validation set. After having a domain specific model, we explore the use of kNN-MT as a way of incorporating domain-specific data at decoding time.

2020

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Findings of the WMT 2020 Shared Task on Chat Translation
M. Amin Farajian | António V. Lopes | André F. T. Martins | Sameen Maruf | Gholamreza Haffari
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

We report the results of the first edition of the WMT shared task on chat translation. The task consisted of translating bilingual conversational text, in particular customer support chats for the English-German language pair (English agent, German customer). This task varies from the other translation shared tasks, i.e. news and biomedical, mainly due to the fact that the conversations are bilingual, less planned, more informal, and often ungrammatical. Furthermore, such conversations are usually characterized by shorter and simpler sentences and contain more pronouns. We received 14 submissions from 6 participating teams, all of them covering both directions, i.e. En->De for agent utterances and De->En for customer messages. We used automatic metrics (BLEU and TER) for evaluating the translations of both agent and customer messages and human document-level direct assessments (DDA) to evaluate the agent translations.

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Document-level Neural MT: A Systematic Comparison
António Lopes | M. Amin Farajian | Rachel Bawden | Michael Zhang | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

In this paper we provide a systematic comparison of existing and new document-level neural machine translation solutions. As part of this comparison, we introduce and evaluate a document-level variant of the recently proposed Star Transformer architecture. In addition to using the traditional metric BLEU, we report the accuracy of the models in handling anaphoric pronoun translation as well as coherence and cohesion using contrastive test sets. Finally, we report the results of human evaluation in terms of Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and analyse the correlation of the results obtained by the automatic metrics with human judgments.

2019

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Unbabel’s Participation in the WMT19 Translation Quality Estimation Shared Task
Fabio Kepler | Jonay Trénous | Marcos Treviso | Miguel Vera | António Góis | M. Amin Farajian | António V. Lopes | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)

We present the contribution of the Unbabel team to the WMT 2019 Shared Task on Quality Estimation. We participated on the word, sentence, and document-level tracks, encompassing 3 language pairs: English-German, English-Russian, and English-French. Our submissions build upon the recent OpenKiwi framework: We combine linear, neural, and predictor-estimator systems with new transfer learning approaches using BERT and XLM pre-trained models. We compare systems individually and propose new ensemble techniques for word and sentence-level predictions. We also propose a simple technique for converting word labels into document-level predictions. Overall, our submitted systems achieve the best results on all tracks and language pairs by a considerable margin.

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Unbabel’s Submission to the WMT2019 APE Shared Task: BERT-Based Encoder-Decoder for Automatic Post-Editing
António V. Lopes | M. Amin Farajian | Gonçalo M. Correia | Jonay Trénous | André F. T. Martins
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 3: Shared Task Papers, Day 2)

This paper describes Unbabel’s submission to the WMT2019 APE Shared Task for the English-German language pair. Following the recent rise of large, powerful, pre-trained models, we adapt the BERT pretrained model to perform Automatic Post-Editing in an encoder-decoder framework. Analogously to dual-encoder architectures we develop a BERT-based encoder-decoder (BED) model in which a single pretrained BERT encoder receives both the source src and machine translation mt strings. Furthermore, we explore a conservativeness factor to constrain the APE system to perform fewer edits. As the official results show, when trained on a weighted combination of in-domain and artificial training data, our BED system with the conservativeness penalty improves significantly the translations of a strong NMT system by -0.78 and +1.23 in terms of TER and BLEU, respectively. Finally, our submission achieves a new state-of-the-art, ex-aequo, in English-German APE of NMT.

2018

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Evaluation of Terminology Translation in Instance-Based Neural MT Adaptation
M. Amin Farajian | Nicola Bertoldi | Matteo Negri | Marco Turchi | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

We address the issues arising when a neural machine translation engine trained on generic data receives requests from a new domain that contains many specific technical terms. Given training data of the new domain, we consider two alternative methods to adapt the generic system: corpus-based and instance-based adaptation. While the first approach is computationally more intensive in generating a domain-customized network, the latter operates more efficiently at translation time and can handle on-the-fly adaptation to multiple domains. Besides evaluating the generic and the adapted networks with conventional translation quality metrics, in this paper we focus on their ability to properly handle domain-specific terms. We show that instance-based adaptation, by fine-tuning the model on-the-fly, is capable to significantly boost the accuracy of translated terms, producing translations of quality comparable to the expensive corpusbased method.

2017

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Neural vs. Phrase-Based Machine Translation in a Multi-Domain Scenario
M. Amin Farajian | Marco Turchi | Matteo Negri | Nicola Bertoldi | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

State-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) systems are generally trained on specific domains by carefully selecting the training sets and applying proper domain adaptation techniques. In this paper we consider the real world scenario in which the target domain is not predefined, hence the system should be able to translate text from multiple domains. We compare the performance of a generic NMT system and phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBMT) system by training them on a generic parallel corpus composed of data from different domains. Our results on multi-domain English-French data show that, in these realistic conditions, PBMT outperforms its neural counterpart. This raises the question: is NMT ready for deployment as a generic/multi-purpose MT backbone in real-world settings?

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Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation through Unsupervised Adaptation
M. Amin Farajian | Marco Turchi | Matteo Negri | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

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Multi-source Neural Automatic Post-Editing: FBK’s participation in the WMT 2017 APE shared task
Rajen Chatterjee | M. Amin Farajian | Matteo Negri | Marco Turchi | Ankit Srivastava | Santanu Pal
Proceedings of the Second Conference on Machine Translation

2016

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FBK’s Neural Machine Translation Systems for IWSLT 2016
M. Amin Farajian | Rajen Chatterjee | Costanza Conforti | Shahab Jalalvand | Vevake Balaraman | Mattia A. Di Gangi | Duygu Ataman | Marco Turchi | Matteo Negri | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation

In this paper, we describe FBK’s neural machine translation (NMT) systems submitted at the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) 2016. The systems are based on the state-of-the-art NMT architecture that is equipped with a bi-directional encoder and an attention mechanism in the decoder. They leverage linguistic information such as lemmas and part-of-speech tags of the source words in the form of additional factors along with the words. We compare performances of word and subword NMT systems along with different optimizers. Further, we explore different ensemble techniques to leverage multiple models within the same and across different networks. Several reranking methods are also explored. Our submissions cover all directions of the MSLT task, as well as en-{de, fr} and {de, fr}-en directions of TED. Compared to previously published best results on the TED 2014 test set, our models achieve comparable results on en-de and surpass them on en-fr (+2 BLEU) and fr-en (+7.7 BLEU) language pairs.

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WAGS: A Beautiful English-Italian Benchmark Supporting Word Alignment Evaluation on Rare Words
Luisa Bentivogli | Mauro Cettolo | M. Amin Farajian | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

This paper presents WAGS (Word Alignment Gold Standard), a novel benchmark which allows extensive evaluation of WA tools on out-of-vocabulary (OOV) and rare words. WAGS is a subset of the Common Test section of the Europarl English-Italian parallel corpus, and is specifically tailored to OOV and rare words. WAGS is composed of 6,715 sentence pairs containing 11,958 occurrences of OOV and rare words up to frequency 15 in the Europarl Training set (5,080 English words and 6,878 Italian words), representing almost 3% of the whole text. Since WAGS is focused on OOV/rare words, manual alignments are provided for these words only, and not for the whole sentences. Two off-the-shelf word aligners have been evaluated on WAGS, and results have been compared to those obtained on an existing benchmark tailored to full text alignment. The results obtained confirm that WAGS is a valuable resource, which allows a statistically sound evaluation of WA systems’ performance on OOV and rare words, as well as extensive data analyses. WAGS is publicly released under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

2014

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Online Word Alignment for Online Adaptive Machine Translation
M. Amin Farajian | Nicola Bertoldi | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Humans and Computer-assisted Translation

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MT-EQuAl: a Toolkit for Human Assessment of Machine Translation Output
Christian Girardi | Luisa Bentivogli | Mohammad Amin Farajian | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

2013

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FBK’s machine translation systems for the IWSLT 2013 evaluation campaign
Nicola Bertoldi | M. Amin Farajian | Prashant Mathur | Nicholas Ruiz | Marcello Federico
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Evaluation Campaign

This paper describes the systems submitted by FBK for the MT track of IWSLT 2013. We participated in the English-French as well as the bidirectional Persian-English translation tasks. We report substantial improvements in our English-French systems over last year’s baselines, largely due to improved techniques of combining translation and language models. For our Persian-English and English-Persian systems, we observe substantive improvements over baselines submitted by the workshop organizers, due to enhanced language-specific text normalization and the creation of a large monolingual news corpus in Persian.